Tracking Central Asians' Trails To Jihad In Syria

SUZAK VILLAGE, Kyrgyzstan -- Mekhribbon has lived a mother's nightmare since she last spoke to her son by telephone during the summer.

She hadn't seen him since 2011, when he and five friends left their ethnic Uzbek village of Suzak in southern Kyrgyzstan for migrant work near Moscow.

From that last call, Mekhribbon learned that all six young men had left Russia to join Al-Qaeda and wage jihad in Syria against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

"He sent some money after the first month, then he disappeared," Mekhribbon says. "The last phone call he made was about five months ago. It was a very long number. Nobody answered when we tried to call him back. Then we asked police -- security officials -- to help us. We gave them the phone number my son called from when he told me 'I will come back,' and that's all."

Parents of the others also contacted Kyrgyzstan's State Committee for National Security after receiving similar phone calls from Syria. They don't know where their sons are now, but fear they've been killed. And they are asking about the trail that took their sons from their tiny Central Asian village to Syria's civil war.

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Written and reported by Ron Synovitz in Prague, with additional reporting by Elenora Beishenbek in Kyrgyzstan, Shuhrat Babajanov in Turkey, and RFE/RL's Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Tajik services.